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First time accepted submitter Type44Q writes "Well, the latest edition of Mint is finally here (the release candidate, anyway); according to The Linux Mint Blog, 'For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. We're very proud of MATE, Cinnamon, MDM and all the components used in this release, and we're very excited to show you how they all fit together in Linux Mint 14.'"

EFF posted an article about full-disk encryption (FDE) in Ubuntu 12.10 [eff.org] and how easy it is to set up through ubiquity, the application used to install Ubuntu. The article also mentions that the next version of Mint, which is based on Ubuntu and therefore uses ubiquity for installation, should have the same easy FDE option.

FDE is good for privacy and security; as EFF's article notes, having it be as simple as possible to set up can only be a good thing. If this new version of Linux Mint features this FDE option, I will strongly consider switching to it, and will certainly try it out at the very least.

There is still no FDE in Mint 14. Even worse, the reports I've read suggest that Mint 14 broke the popular howoto hack [linuxmint.com]. The feature voting board [linuxmint.com] was recently updated to say this feature was "selected" though. Hopefully that means it will be coming in Mint 15. Linux distributions are useless to me without encryption; you're basically saying "this is not meant for real work" to every business user who might consider it. It's a shame that Mint isn't ready to fill in yet for companies who are pushed away from Microsoft OSes by the mess around Windows 8.

FDE is mandatory for keeping all of the data on a stolen laptop from being exposed. It allows something that is broken to be repairs without fear that the repair company will get access to everything as well. That someone might give up their key if pressed for it--via violence, court order, or stealth [schneier.com]--doesn't mean it's useless to use in the general case.

Been using mint debian edition as my daily desktop for awhile. I'm really loving the polish and look of Mate on Mint. Went with the debian edition as I'm tired of Ubuntu and its anti competitive behavior. But the biggest issue I'm running is neither are rolling releases. I have a mixed LMDE and Debian testing running which has been mostly ok.

Also, running mate which is based grtk2 you have to use a theme that looks good on gtk2 & gtrk3.

I like the idea that Mint includes a lot of stuff out of the box (mp3 etc). However most people now have moved onto the Unity interface. I don't see that as an option, which makes it seem a bit ancient.

However most people now have moved onto the Unity interface. I don't see that as an option, which makes it seem a bit ancient

Let's be honest, if you think Unity is the next 'big thing' then you've got your head up Mark Shuttleworth's arse. Just because it comes from Canonical, it doesn't mean it's good.

If you put some thought into it, it's rather clear how Unity is (at best) an average desktop interface and a terrible tablet interface. It's incredibly unstable, poorly thought out and simply not configurable. It would serve quite averagely as a touch screen desktop productivity GUI. To top it off, Gnome 3 is actually a better

Wait, you WANT Unity, and are hesitant to try Mint because it DOESN'T have it? If you actually like Unity and can get by with it, good for you, and stick to Ubuntu. One of Mint's main selling points is that it does NOT rely on Unity, which many of us find absolutely abhorrent. MATE is included or available, and is essentially GNOME 2, which was fine. Cinnamon is something new, and is very agreeable to folks who liked GNOME 2, while being a newer project that is showing a lot of potential. KDE just doesn't j

Maybe everybody but me keeps up with all the strange little Linux distros. But I don't. So just for stupid people like me, could all these breathless distro update announcements take just a little time to explain why I should give a shit about their distro? What does it have to offer that better-known distros do not?

Well, the Mint team also develops Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork) and supports Mate (Gnome 2 fork). So if you want a good, modern Linux desktop, this is pretty much the distro to get.

I can install those on Ubuntu, and then I get to keep using PPAs, and Ubuntu software center. What do I actually get out of installing mint that I don't get with Ubuntu? So far I know of at least one thing (full disk encryption) that I don't get with mint that I do get with Ubuntu.

Maybe everybody but me keeps up with all the strange little Linux distros.

Short Answer : There is only Ubuntu

Longer Answer: If your not interested in Linux your shouldn't. That is the short answer, and even if you are interested in linux you shouldn't. The reality is. Distributions [Distro for short] are just that collections packages [Applications/Modules Building Blocks that make up a modern OS with sensible selection of programs] together in essence a kernel[BSD/Linux] Userland[GNU] + Display Server[X and Wayland] + Windows Manager[KDE/Gnome/XFCE] + Office Package[LibreOffice Calligra Suite] + Internet Browser....you get the idea.

Now because Linux can be tailored for different processors processors [ARM;Mips...] different community is [Religious Christianity and Location Brazilian] Specialist [Boot Disks; Extra Secure]...but if your using any of these then you know why! there is even a Ubuntu Satanic Edition http://ubuntusatanic.org/news/ [ubuntusatanic.org] Satanists.

But mainstream there really is only Debian, Ubuntu(Popular Debian variant), and Fedora(You have heard of Red Hat) [Yes I could easily add a couple more:)]. In context of this article Mint should be considered Ubuntu without Unity[Its own Metro nighmare]

You know, I can't make a whole lot of sense out of your writing. Which fits. You can't be bothered to express yourself clearly

Having reread my post. Its not bad. The reality is I use "Mint because I do not want or use Unity"...and your right, its confusing blobs, but its no less confusing than I'm "sticking with windows 7 because I don't want Metro".

The worrying think here is you have posted 8 times in this forum, actually proud at your basic lack of knowledge. You are I suspect being disingenuous.

Maybe everybody but me keeps up with all the strange little Linux distros. But I don't. So just for stupid people like me, could all these breathless distro update announcements take just a little time to explain why I should give a shit about their distro? What does it have to offer that better-known distros do not?

Should I give a shit about Windows 8, which is getting tons of mentions everywhere but is a huge step backwards? I don't care about it, but guess what, lots of people do. Same deal with you and Mint, which is the top desktop Linux distro today. It is not strange or little in any way. Linux Mint has become what Ubuntu intended to be - an easy to use distro that is complete, has plenty of community support, and makes for a great desktop OS, though it is now even better than Ubuntu and is gaining market share

I was thinking of switching from Ubuntu to PCLinuxOS, because I want to use a computer without ever needing to reinstall, in other words, rolling releases.Mint looks really nice, but I don't think it has rolling releases.Has anyone else used that PCLinuxOS, and how is it? Any better rolling releases distros out there that aren't too hard to install and set up?

The debian edition of mint is usable (though less friendly than ubuntu version) and is a rolling release. It updates slow though and I'm used to distro versions where I can easily know what version I'm running.

I've been using PCLinuxOS (KDE) for three years on 4 machines, and have been happy with it. The rolling releases are great and usually work. There have been a couple of problems, but they're usually fixed in a week. The maintenance crew maintain an active and friendly prescence on their forum.
The distro is independent, not based on Debian or Ubuntu, so the occasional independent software may not have a plug-and-play distribution.

I know they have a XCFE port of mint. But if Mint is basically Ubuntu why would I want to switch from Xubuntu to xcfe mint? I'd like th try mint but as long as I'm on xcfe then I see no reason to move.

It goes both ways, there's no reason to use Xubuntu over XFCE mint. Both are the same OS, the difference is default selection of software, wallpapers, theme and set up of panels and start menu. Arguably Mint is less gimmicky and looks less dated, from screenshots Xubuntu looks like a dark, poor man's OSX rip off whereas Mint Xfce gives you a taskbar on the bottom, a better start menu, is themed white / light gray. It also has LibreOffice instead of Abiword.

I have trouble taking Mint seriously. I only hear about it when people complains about Unity.

No, seriously, every single time I hear about Mint is because there's some controversial thing about Ubuntu and a lot of guys come in saying "I moved to Mint years ago because I am tired of $NEWS_TOPIC". At times there are also Mint comments even if the news about Ubuntu are good (I am sure I saw a "I moved to Mint..." routine on a few of the Steam for Linux news reports in Ubuntu-related news sites).

I am skeptic about how valid Distrowatch's score is. Until I find a real happy user as opposed to someone complaining about Canonical in every Ubuntu-related news, it just sounds like haters got busy inflating scores (wouldn't be the first time something of the sort happens). Everyone I know uses the same usual subjects, and while anecdote is not proof, I've met a sizable amount of Linux users from being a developer. Not even a single issue reported by Mint users.

So, is there someone using Mint for any reason that is not spiting Canonical? I'd like to know, just to make sure I receive information not coming from people giving the impression of being zealots. They seriously need some PR as opposed to just say bad things about the competition.

It's like that commenter above that asked about what made Mint good and didn't get a single answer other than "it's not Ubuntu".

I am skeptic about how valid Distrowatch's score is.....It's like that commenter above that asked about what made Mint good and didn't get a single answer other than "it's not Ubuntu".

You should read through the comments. People on the whole love Debian, and love Ubuntu's spin on Debian. Most mint users also *love* Ubuntu. What they don't love is "Unity" They love "Cinnomon". In fact thats what they talk about in the summary.

Look at the pictures. One comes with a menu panel...the other a full screen of applications icons similar to a smartphone.

People are not zealots, they are exercising choice on a platform that allows it. In fact Mint is basically Ubuntu with Unity replace with Cinnamon. In fact so many people prefer cinnamon over unity mint has become the most popular download on distrowatch.

I immediately install KDE4....And I am not exactly saying they are zealots

I see your promoting something by calling the other side zealots...its kind of sad that we live in that world. KDE is an excellent windows manager [and XFCE is too]. Many people including myself love Gnome and gnome applications...we are just not particularly enamoured by either Unity of Gnome Shell [even though they have got an awful lot better]. There is friendly competition between Gnome and KDE, but its just that friendly.

Personally having noticed E17 is at alpha, it the first time I have been excited f

Ubuntu screwed up with Unity, which did more to divide the Linux landscape than any other event in recent history. Mint has been working harder than anyone to make sure people can work hard with a useful desktop. Thank you all.

The London Stock Exchange uses the Linux based MillenniumIT Millennium Exchange software for its trading platform and predicts that moving to Linux from Windows will give it an annual cost savings of at least £10 million ($14.7 million

Yes, Ubuntu's goofy naming scheme is a little odd, especially now that they are supposed to be a legitimate leader in the field. In contrast, Linux Mint was, and still largely is, the pet project of one man who likes to give his releases women's names, which seems less strange. I'm not saying I like the names, and in fact I use Mint and always go by version numbers rather than the names, but to each his own.

I don't care about the name and just hope LM14 works and Cinnamon progresses, though I still pref

Whomever started this naming version releases by nick name should be shot. Is this named Nadia because that is the wife of the main developer and he had to show some love otherwise he's never get some love again?

Me, If i developed anything and name it nice names, like "Fuckoff" "sloppyshit", "kludge", and "ididyourmom"

I guess we all need to feel cool.

Well, Clement Lefebvre has been naming his Mint releases since he started the project, something like six years ago, so I doubt he is going to stop now just because a few people think the whole concept is dumb. And you are free to create something and name it "fuckoff" or "sloppyshit" if you so desire. In fact, I recommend you go spend some time on that and less time whining here.

No, a jackass is one who thinks that it's cute and funny to introduce confusing reference designation schemes...

No, a Jackass is one who stubbornly complains about things of little significance, and antagonizes others instead of doing anything productive at all. Sound familiar? It should.

Debian Lenny. [snip dubious claims of friendship].

The names are just codenames, you know like everyone uses: "Longhorn", "Chicago", "Tiger", "Snow Leopard", etc. They don't matter in the least bit except to the devs and irrational people like you. Debian is from the names Deborah and Ian, who started the distro. Lenny and the other names used for Debian releases are from the

Cinnamon is just a fork of Gnome Shell from Gnome3, but proper in appearance and operation and with actual working applets like Gnome2 and in general discarding all the garbage in the "real" Gnome Shell.

AIUI Mate and cinnamon are two different approaches to the same problem.

The problem being that the gnome developers decided to throw out the boring but functional gnome2 and replace it with the radical gnome3 and further the distro vendors decided to allow gnome3 to take the package names previously used by gnome2 thereby screwing those users who wanted to stick with the desktop they knew while upgrading the rest of their OS (and things are sufficiantly tightly coupled in the linux world that sticking with an old OS version is not really a reasonable option).

The mate approach has been to fork gnome2 and rename the components to remove the config. This produced immediate results but long term leaves them with a load of forked stuff that perhaps doesn't really need to be forked and no easy way of getting any good stuff that comes out of gnome3. The cinnamon approach is to try and build a traditional GUI within the gnome3 framework, this avoids relying on outdated and barely maintained foundations but it also means a lot more work upfront and probablly more user visible change and runs the risk that gnome will decide to screw everyone again.

I use Mint 13 and still have no idea if I am running MATE or Cinnamon nor do I really care. It works just fine for me. It will be nice to find out the major differences between the too, which one you are currently using and how to switch to the other one.

hmm is Mint the most popular Linux Desktop distro? I've heard about Mint, and that it was a response to Unity. Still I hadn't kept tabs on it lately, and didn't know whether it had fully capitalized on the Unity debacle. Also, I'm not shopping for Linux systems lately since I've been using NeuroDebian and centOS exclusively in my fMRI analyses.

Well even though I like (the) relatively new Unity interface, a lot of other people really don't. I think that mostly it's because while Unity is great for new users who aren't especially computer savvy, a lot of Linux professionals find it gets in the way -- and, of course, experienced old Linux hands are exactly the kind of people who visit DistroWatch.

That said, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks the operating system will see 20 million new PCs sold with Ubuntu in 2012, and that's not counting people who install it. Those people will also largely be new computer users. If Ubuntu can get most of the new users coming to Linux, I think they'll be happy even if they're no longer as popular with old-guard Linux desktop users.

I've been using Linux Mint as a replacement for Ubuntu after Ubuntu tried to Mac-ify the UI.

I want a desktop Linux distro as a drop in replacement for Windows that I can use in situations where there is no requirement for Windows software. So I don't want to have to modify the UI to get it looking the same for people who have learned how to use a computer by rote memorisation on Windows. If I wanted to modify everything I'd be installing Debian or Gentoo.

There was a time when you could expect people on Slashdot to know about the most popular Linux desktop distro and not need to be spoon-fed that information.

There is nothing informative about "an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience". At the very least the summary could have contained something detailed or specific about the distro release apart from its name.

Would it hurt to include a few words explaining what the hell Mint even is or why we should care there's a new version?

Ubuntu is the "go to" version of GNU\Linux, based on the incredibly good Debian, but supports features without sacrificing too much stability, and because it has some money thrown at it. Has rightfully become the most popular distribution out there.

Unfortunately Gnome; Microsoft; Apple; Canonical have all made the decision that the future is ditching mice and keyboard, and running our fingers all over the screen.

Mint has become popular simply by supplying a desktop that those of us who still love mice and keyboards love [whatever you think of that]

In short its a great new OS release, get it downloaded and installed now...or at least read the article before posting on Slashdot.

Would it hurt to include a few words explaining what the hell Mint even is or why we should care there's a new version?

Linux Mint [wikipedia.org] is a computer operating system based on the Linux distribution Ubuntu. Linux Mint adds many features that baseline Ubuntu does not have, one of which is providing a more complete out of the box experience.

MATE [wikipedia.org] is a desktop environment forked from the now-unmaintained code base of GNOME 2.

Cinnamon [wikipedia.org] is a fork of GNOME Shell, initially developed by (and for) Linux Mint. It attempts to provide a more traditional user environment based on the desktop metaphor, like GNOME 2.

Linux Mint is a distribution of Linux that is based off of Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu, it uses Debian packages.

When Ubuntu made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("Unity") and the GNOME project made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("GNOME Shell"), Linux Mint in turn made the decision to support those of us who loved GNOME 2. We have two options: MATE and Cinnamon. Both are well-supported by Linux Mint (and in fact primary development on both is by Linux Mint guys).

MATE is simply a fork of GNOME 2. For reasons that are not clear to me, GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 cannot co-exist on the same system... something about library conflicts. (Doesn't Linux have library versioning that should make it possible to avoid these conflicts? Eh, moving on.) The MATE project did a mass rename on everything in GNOME ("libgnome" -> "libmate", etc.) so MATE can co-exist on the same system with GNOME 3. So, those of us who loved the smooth polish that came from man-decades of development in GNOME can still use it.

But MATE isn't the future. From what I have heard, the library underpinnings of GNOME 3 really have improved over GNOME 2, and the new technology is a step up. Who wants to be locked into a frozen clone of GNOME 2 forever? Thus, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a project to build on top of GNOME 3 and provide a user experience similar to GNOME 2. New plugins, new themes, etc. all go together to make a very usable desktop; but GNOME 3 apps will work seamlessly with it.

Many disgruntled Ubuntu users have abandoned Ubuntu for Linux Mint. Mint is now the top Linux distribution [distrowatch.com] on distrowatch.com; I'm not sure it was even in the top ten before the whole Unity/GNOME Shell fiasco, but now it's number one.

Linux Mint has always focused on making a beautiful system that is out-of-the-box usable. Now they are one of the top choices for people who have rejected Unity and GNOME Shell.

For me, the most important part of the announcement is that they have the password keeper working right now. I'm using Linux Mint on a laptop at work, and I can't connect to Windows shares; I'm hoping the new updates will sort that out for me.

Since this is based on Debian packages, I can probably just update in place without needing to do a full re-install.

P.S. One of my biggest complaints about GNOME 3 is that I can no longer take sit a Windows user down and just say "it works pretty much like what you are used to". You may like GNOME Shell and you may think it is better, but you cannot argue that it is very different, and it would take a bit of training before a guest could use it. Linux Mint, on the other hand, works a lot like pre-Windows 8 versions of Windows; with a little customization and theming I'll bet you could fool people into thinking it was actually Windows XP.

Likewise with Unity, it is pretty different from Windows. But it's very similar to the Mac, so maybe users familiar with the Mac can use it?

You must be new here. Mint has been mentioned plenty of times on/., has been in the top few most popular on Distrowatch and received a lot of attention from several other top Linux and OS sites for a few years now, and has gained a ton more popularity since the GNOME project went nuts and Ubuntu accepted GNOME 3 and went with that Unity BS. Mint is a "major" distro in the opinion of many, and is becoming THE distro for home/desktop use.

With Cinnamon, it definitely doesn't have the program menus at the top of the screen (at least by default; I didn't check if you can get that as option), although it does have those annoying dialog windows which are attached to the main window's title bar, non-movable, usually hiding the stuff you want to see, and since the programs usually were not designed for that, often even missing critical information (the most extreme was a dialog asking "yes" or "no", without any hint what it was asking about, becau

I actually donated to Linux Mint about a month ago, and yet I've given up Linux (again) for Windows 7 (again) due to a lack of comparable software (no, 80% functionality isn't good enough compared to the 100% I get with Windows unfortunately). So I feel kinda stupid for donating and yet still abandoning the operating system. Then again, I do appreciate Linux on an intellectual level so hopefully it helps.

I gave up on Windows 7 for the same reason, and moved full time to Mint. I just cannot find the same functional programs I can on Linux, or they are riddled with malware, or they can charge thousands to do basic things, and I have to sacrifice my privacy to do so, all I end up doing is installing those programs I know from Linux, only I have a massive headache in maintaining all the packages. I gave up in the end after the OS I was using was tied to the hardware it was on? I had to use a live distribution t

Well I suppose I must know how to use Windows better if I choose malware-free software. I will admit this is a skill that comes from experience, but I have a LOT of Windows experience and see little point in switch from something that works so damn well. Windows 8? It can go to hell. Hopefully Metro fails and Windows 9 allows for a more traditional desktop operating system.